Make Beautiful Art from Instagram

Remember when you’d have to drive a roll of film down to the pharmacy for developing, crossing your fingers that the 20 or so photos you took on that amazing vacation to Hollywood — including the one of you meeting David Hasselhoff — would turn out okay? The wait to get the results back was almost as excruciating as anticipating a clean medical diagnosis. So then you bought a Polaroid camera to cater to your need for more instantaneous gratification, but it could cost you more than a dollar a pop for snapshots that might or might not be worthy of taping into the family scrapbook for later generations to enjoy.

In the 21st century, though, the low cost and easy availability of digital cameras has made everyone an amateur photographer. Untethered from the price of film and the uncertainty of missed shots, it can probably be argued that many of us take too many pictures instead of too few these days. Want to see what a Justin Beiber electric toothbrush that your sister saw on the shelf of Rite Aid looks like? How about the vegan meatloaf sandwich your friend had for lunch? Your mom wants you to see a short montage of the last 200 pictures she took of the family dog. And someone who you vaguely remember from high school is certain that you’re curious about how their trip to Montana (the flat part) went, so here’s the whole photo album. Enjoy!

Still, sometimes people will manage to wow you with the images that they capture on their three-generations-old iPhones and upload to popular photo-sharing gallery/social network Instagram. Inspired by their results, you figure that you can probably muster up some equally beautiful photos with a little practice. Voila! Thanks to a good eye and a little tasteful filtering, you can make your recent pint of porter down at the local pub look like fine art. But paging through your Instagram gallery, you lament that the photos are so tiny. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could print them out and hang them on the wall of your office or home for everyone to see?

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Our resident "Bob" (pictured here through the lens of photographer Jason DeFillippo) is in love with a woman who talks to animals. He has a fondness for belting out songs about seafaring and whiskey (arguably inappropriate in most social situations). He's arm-wrestled robots and won. He was born in a lighthouse on the storm-tossed shores of an island that has since been washed away and forgotten, so he's technically a citizen of nowhere. He's never killed in anger. He once underwent therapy for having an alien in his face, but he assures us that he's now feeling "much better." Fogarty also claims that he was once marooned along a tiny archipelago and survived for months using only his wits and a machete, but we find that a little hard to believe.

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